School of Pop, starring King Princess

I just thought some pussy was bomb, and I wanted to write about it,” King Princess tells me, seemingly shrugging off the power and defiance of “Pussy Is God,” her breakout single that was universally hailed upon its late-2018 release. Vice called it “the sexy lesbian love song we’ve been waiting for”; Pitchfork praised it as “textbook pop, a catchy ode to a lover”; and Spin deemed it “a fully-formed pop song… brash and funny, delivered with a confidence and swagger.”

“After we wrote it”—we refers to King Princess, born Mikaela Straus, and frequent co-producer and engineer Mike Malchicoff—“we realized that it was going to be jarring for some people.” She’s right: The sexual charge of “Pussy Is God” is blatant, loud and unashamed. Unlike chart-topping bops cloaked

in corny double entendres (think Britney Spears’s “If U Seek Amy” or Hailee Steinfeld’s “Love Myself”), “Pussy Is God” has no hidden meaning. King Princess’s songwriting is so literal, in fact, that listening to her music reminds one that sex, despite the cultural climate, should be uninhibited and fun: “Your pussy is God and I love it / Gonna kiss me real hard, make me want it.”

Pop music has always worshipped at the altar of sex. Elvis Presley put conservative 1950s America in an orgasmic haze with his pelvic thrust. Madonna drew ire for singing about being “touched for the very first time” in a wedding dress. The Spice Girls achieved their iconic status when the group of five women suggested they “really, really, really wanna zig-a-zig ah,” and Rihanna demanded that a lover “give it to me strong” on her 10th number one U.S. single.

But pop has rarely been overtly proud of sexuality, nor has it embraced its less romantic carnal realities. Burdened by Federal Communications Commission regulations, the genre has remained, since the reign of Madonna in the 1980s, statically cheeky, demure and—as displayed by performers from Dua Lipa to Taylor Swift—fascinated by independence, innocence and romance versus, well, pussy.

In the midst of pop culture’s current fixation on rebelling against the patriarchy, King Princess is using the age-old truth that sex sells to deliver her own narrative—one that is notably uncensored. Much of this creative free­dom can be attributed to how streaming has shifted the industry. Despite her radio-unfriendly music, King Princess, who identifies as a genderqueer lesbian, has been able to win fans (and press attention) in the Wild West of Spotify and its competitors. “Pussy Is God,” with its suggestion that cunnilingus is a form of prayer, glorifies sexual organs while mocking the oppressive nature of organized religion. Going down on a woman is like “praying for hours.”

“[Pussy] holds powers that can’t be understood,” she says.

Her dissent is redolent of that of many other young artists, and even of Madonna, the Queen of Pop herself, but it would be foolish to ignore how King Princess’s queerness has informed her perspectives on sex, eroticism and artistry. Though she was born to free-spirited parents (her father owns New York studio Mission Sound Recording; her mother had a career in fashion and worked as a civil rights activist), “the best sex education I got was through the media,” she tells me. “My teachers talked about queerness and about shit that wouldn’t have been talked about just a couple of years earlier, so I feel very lucky,” she says of her relatively progressive high school. “That said, I didn’t learn shit about my sexuality through those institutions. I wasn’t exposed to queer content through the school system. It was more for straight people. The biggest issue was stu­dents getting pregnant.”

At 20 years old, King Princess belongs to Generation Z—a de­mographic that, according to a 40-year study published in 2017 by the journal Child Develop­ment, is less interested in sex than earlier cohorts. Whether that’s true or not, Planned Parenthood reports that 96 percent of parents in the United States believe their children should be taught about sex in high school. But state-sanctioned sex education—those hard-edged talks about erections, protection and puberty—remains conservative and noncomprehensive. According to the Guttmacher Institute, only 24 states and the District of Columbia mandate sex education in public schools; out of those 24 states, just nine require inclusive discussions of sexual orientation. Yet, in a survey from the University of New Hampshire, more than 70 percent of students said they had watched online porn by the time they were 18. Such statistics seem to support the position that today’s youth are not receiving a proper education about sexual intercourse, let alone sexual pleasure.

Meanwhile, as music becomes more accessible, listenership is becoming harder to regulate. A 2018 study in the U.S. and the U.K. by research startup Steebees found that 63 percent of Generation Z listens to music on Spotify, and 67 percent listens to music on free YouTube. Relatedly, a study conducted by Larry Miller, director of New York University's Steinhardt Music Business Program, reported that terrestrial-radio listening among teenagers decreased by 50 percent between 2005 and 2016, meaning a songwriter's reach is no longer beholden to the FCC, the organization that has long determined whether lyrics are too explicit for airplay and thus mass dissemination.

Emphasizing pop music's new sexual awakening are those mainstream female artists who are leveraging the cultural rise in sex positivity. Think Janelle Monáe (admittedly a crossover artist), who performed her viral hit song “Pynk” as part of a medley at the 2019 Grammys with backup dancers dressed in pants resembling labia. Another is Ariana Grande, who has made the Billboard top 10 by singing about how a sexual encoun­ter left her “walking side to side” and that a man “can hit it in the mornin’/Yeah, yeah, like it’s yours.”

Thanks to streaming, the kids of Gen­eration Z don’t need a parent’s permission to discover any artist, let alone the subversive ones. The postmillennial generations may be the first to enjoy that freedom. Millennials, after all, sometimes needed an adult 18 years or older to purchase an album the Record­ing Industry Association of America had slapped with a “parental advisory.” Be­fore that, MTV practiced its dominance over what people listened to by banish­ing steamy videos to late night—or off the network altogether.

Couple a broken sex-education system with the internet’s vast reserves of sex­ual material, and young people are left with few role models who responsibly preach the benefits of sex positivity, con­sent and self-pleasure without sacrific­ing their artistry or sexual identity. This is why the rise of sexually expressive pop artists is worth paying attention to. King Princess’s songs feel intimate and educational, and some are even uncom­fortable. But they also feel organic ver­sus contrived or salacious for the sake of controversy. Her sexually charged 2018 track, "1950," is another lustrous ode to queer love, inspired by author Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt, the novel adapted into the acclaimed 2015 lesbian film Carol. "I hate it when dudes try to chase me," coos King Princess in a coiling metaphor for the way both queer and unrequited love carry the same suppressed and confusing codes. "I love it when we play 1950."

An impromptu tweet of her lyrics by Harry Styles introduces King Princess to a massive online audience in March 2018. Grammy-winning superproducer Mark Ronson took notice and later signed her to his label, Zelig Records, at which point she became a queer superhero. In addition to appearing on Ronson's latest album, Late Night Feelings, she has also collaborated with Fiona Apple.

Her success forces the question: What responsibility do musicians have regarding their unprecedented access to younger listeners? And how does that power contend with pop culture's historical preference for censoring sexuality through euphemism? Is it detrimental for the sexually inexperienced to listen to, say, Tove Lo sing about lady wood (“Dirty on the inside, damaged goods with nothing but pride / Yeah, you give me wood / Give me lady wood”) while being taught that abstinence is the best form of protection?

“To learn through the lyrics of a song, the media or the internet helps young people discover the culture they came from,” says Amelia Abraham, author of

Queer Intentions: A (Personal) Journey Through LGBTQ Culture. “If you’re not taught by your parents or in sex education in school about your culture

and history, then where are you going to learn about it?”

King Princess isn’t the only female pop artist tearing up taboos and inspiring

an age of sexual discovery within pop. The meteoric rise of Lizzo, and her cross-genre appeal, is tied to her professions of self-love and sexual pride. And the 23-year-old bisexual singer-songwriter Slayyyter, born Catherine Slater, has gained a sizable fan base by releasing hypersexual music online. “Boy, can you eat me right?” she asks over scuzzy electronic beats in “Candy,” released in September 2018. Her spin on Mariah Carey’s holiday classic “All I Want for Christmas” is no less matter-of-fact: “All I want for Christmas is to get fucked / Take a big hit, get my tits sucked,” the chorus repeats.

A former sex worker, Slayyyter makes music in her bedroom. Earlier this year, she went viral after teasing 14 seconds of her song “Mine” on Twitter. “I didn’t know your name, boy / I fell in love / First kiss, your lips drove me insane,

boy,” she sings, adding living proof that sexually liberated artists can rise from obscurity without simultaneously commercializing and diminishing sex for radio spins.

“I have always been a very sex-positive person, but as a former sex worker, it’s something that comes naturally to me,” Slayyyter tells Playboy. While her approach to sex is imperative to her success, Slayyyter wants people to know her sexuality isn’t a shtick. An independent artist, she remains in charge of her body and her sound. “I recently saw someone on Twitter say my brand is ‘Being a Whore,’ ” she says. “It ticked me off, because I don’t think of it as that. It’s just who I am.”

No surprise, a lesson on owning one’s sexual identity is not included among the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “19 Critical Sexual Education Topics,” an online learning aid meant to inform sex-education curricula. Intimacy and pleasure are similarly ignored. Considering that humans have been fornicating for pleasure’s sake for eternity—and that sex has consumed adolescence for just as long—it’s strange to think we’re still reckoning with improper education and debates about sexuality. The breakthrough pop stars of 2018 and 2019 seem to be recognizing an opportunity, and their success isn’t dependent on an industry that for decades has manufactured and rewarded hypersexualized but hollow pop stars and catalogs of euphemistic songs. Pop stars can now be sexy, sex positive and sexually explicit. But this isn’t just about pussy. It’s a generational awakening.